Wednesday, October 8, 2014

My five year, mostly sunless odyssey in the Seattle area is finally coming to an end. I'll be visiting occasionally, but I can't wait to move back to Dallas next month. Thanks to everyone at Valve for making the place such an amazing company to work at. Also, a huge thanks to the truly world class developers at Rad Game Tools for their key help during the Steam Linux launch and helping us kick start vogl's development. Without the devs at Rad a lot of the stuff we did over the past few years just would not have happened. (Umm Gabe, why don't you just buy these guys already and officialize the Valve "satellite office" in Kirkland?)

To the Linux and GL community, I feel bad about quitting Valve before completing vogl. (Not that something like vogl could ever really be completed!) In the couple months before I quit I did everything I could think of (wrote the wiki, got UE 4 compatibility, built the regression suite, wrote up a 6+ month itemized task roadmap, etc.) to ensure vogl's development would continue moving forward without me. From studying the changes made on vogl's github repo after I quit it certainly looks like the devs at Valve and LunarG have done a good job moving it forward.

I think it'll be 3 years or more before OpenGL-Next is usable and relevant to shipping products. So even though vogl's has little chance of scaling beyond GL v4.x, it should remain a useful tool for a long time. I may fork it one day if I have to do any hardcore GL development again.

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.